In the past, we have noted a marked difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gate’s presentation styles. Similarly, check out this parody of Microsoft’s repackaging of the ipod (via Seth Godin). Wouldn’t be half as hilarious if it weren’t so spot on!

A lot has been made recently of pictures of a next-generation iPod. It is known that Apple is working on (and has patented technologies regarding) new kinds of touch-screen interfaces that would be well suited to an iPod. So when this picture appeared on Flickr, it even had me wondering if it might not be a prototype of the real deal.

Not so, says one unnamed individual – have a look at this YouTube video to see how such a fake might have been produced.

When Apple released iWeb last month, we naturally had to take a good long look at it. Who knows, it could be competition. In this case, we decided that it wasn’t. And neither is the Google Page Creator, launched today.

The Page Creator allows you to quickly create simple pages in your browser (sorry, not Safari!) and publish them on the googlepages.com site. Unlike iWeb, there is no means to publish them to a site of your own, meaning that any website you make must stay at yourname.googlepages.com. Also, the templates are a bit fuggly, and it doesn’t automatically link your pages together like iWeb, nor allow for blogging or podcasting.

There will always be tools to quickly create web pages. There have been tools like these for as long as there has been a web. What makes this noteworthy is the name Google, not the service itself. But if you’re looking for an easy way to create web pages that don’t suck, you might be better served by iWeb.

On a side note, the funniest comment ever posted to this blog is at the end of my iWeb review. A must-read!

A recent New York Times articles notes:

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered

On AOL, for example, [paid messages] will go straight to users’ main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links.

When I first heard of this move a while back, it sounded like something that would decrease SPAM. Make SPAMMERS pay and the benefit goes away. Now, it appears that there is a real incentive for paying, as the reward is avoiding SPAM filters! Sounds like a direct line to consumers is being offered at a quarter of a penny each. The folks at MoveOn.org are weary of this move, pleading:

AOL, don’t auction off preferential access to people’s inboxes to giant emailers, while leaving people’s friends, families, and favorite causes wondering if their emails are being delivered at all. The Internet is a force for democracy and economic innovation only because it is open to all Internet users equally—we must not let it become an unlevel playing field.

Agree with them? There’s a petition going around.

The Steve Jobs twin obsessions with ease-of-use and beauty are fairly well known, especially when it comes to really odd details such as how the circuit board looks. Even when users will never be able to see it. Yet reading Lokesh Dhakar’s Squeaky Clean CSS has reminded me how important even the formatting of the source code of your web pages is, even if no user will ever see that, either.

Some of the tips I don’t agree with, such as keeping the closing brace indented, but for the most part it’s a really brief, well-written summary of how to keep your HTML and CSS comprehensible, even as your site grows and grows.

The March 2006 issue of Wired has a nice, albeit brief, interview with Michel Gondry called Keeping it Reel. In it, Gondry discusses his work on the forthcoming documentary starring Dave Chappelle. My favorite quote:

Q: How did you add your creative stamp?

A: Editing is crucial, maybe even more creative than the actual shooting. Every time you juxtapose two images, you say something. Editing is how you transmit your message, even if the message is that there is no message. You can make someone look mean or nice with exactly the same footage.

Also well worth watching is the recent DVD compilation of videos by the Chemical Brothers. Among the extras is a video showing Gondry planning extensively for, and shooting a demonstration video of, Star Guitar.

If you are in Portland tomorrow (Wednesday) night, do swing by Holocene for the fourth Kelley and Jason Show – doors at 8PM, show at 10PM, only $3 to get in. And get this: The fist ten River Tsunami’s through the door get free admission and beer! How can you pass on that offer?

Word has it that the Ricky Gervais Podcast, the world’s most popular (and surely the funniest) such podcast, is going to a subscription model, rather than free downloads. Since we produce our own video podcast, this naturally caught my eye.

Is this going to work? We prefer to pay for much of my entertainment. I have a Netflix subscription rather than a television. I subscribe to many magazines, and prefer to pay more to have less ads. And it seems to me that $7 a month (four audio podcasts) is a bit much for two hours of chatting. More than a magazine, but it surely costs much less to produce and distribute.